The War at the Edge of the World

by Ian Ross

  The horse shied back, kicking; the rider still straddled the animal’s back, his arms loose and stiff, streamers of bright blood jetting from the hacked stump of his neck.

  The soldier stared, uncomprehending at first. Pain filled his head and body, raw and brutal, but he was still on his feet, still alive. And now there were others alongside him, raising their shields beside his. Overhead flew the darts and the javelins. The panicked horse with its headless rider bolted forward, and the shield wall opened to let it through, still carrying its grisly trophy. The other cataphracts had turned as the momentum of their charge died under the hail of iron. Some were caught, ringed by Roman blades, and cut down. The wall of shields held; the gap in the line was closed. Then the horns sounded the advance, brassy and triumphant, the men of the legion stepped forward in unison, climbing over the bodies of the slain and the broken corpse of their centurion.

  The young soldier felt only the pump of pain through his body. Time and distance had no meaning now. A wrack of broken weapons and bodies, tumbled men and horses, caught at his feet. Around him he could hear the victory chant, ROME AND HERCULES, ROME AND HERCULES. The slope was taking him downwards, through the battleground and into the area of scattered slaughter, where the allied cavalry had already cut up the fugitives. His head was ringing, his vision shrunk to a bright wavering funnel ahead of him. He saw Persian banners trampled in the dust, the stream running red with blood, corpses sprawled in the shallows. The water had widened and he could not think why, then he glanced to the left and saw the vast bulk of a dead elephant, fletched with arrows, blocking the stream. He took a few more staggering steps forward and collapsed. He barely felt the arms that caught him and eased him down onto the solid ground.

  ‘This is going to hurt,’ a voice said, ‘but not for long.’ He felt a wrenching pressure in his shoulder and pain burst through him. He was awake, staring into the sweating face of a bearded army surgeon.

  ‘Don’t know how long you were walking around with a dislocated shoulder,’ the doctor said, swabbing at his face with a damp rag, ‘but that should fix it. You need to rest, though. There’s a lot of blood on you, but not too much of it’s yours.’

  ‘Did we win?’ he heard himself saying. His tongue felt dead. The doctor grinned.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said.

  Then he was on his feet again, his left arm bound up in a sling. Ranks of men opened before him, and a centurion he did not recognise was leading him forward. Teeth clenched, he tried to breathe slowly through his nose and not curse aloud at the fierce ache in his shoulder.

  Noise of horns, and voices raised in acclamation. To his right he saw a raised mound heaped with Persian weapons and banners. A figure loomed up before him, out of the bright haze: he saw a glowering red face, a black beard above a gilded cuirass.

  ‘Come on now, lad,’ the centurion behind him said in a harsh whisper. ‘Don’t you know how to greet your emperor properly?’

  ‘No need for ceremony,’ the man in the gilded armour cried. ‘We’re all brothers here! Brothers in victory!’ He raised his arm, and just for a moment the young soldier feared he was about to be clapped on the shoulder. Galerius, he remembered – this was the Caesar Galerius.

  ‘Dominus!’ the centurion said, with a slight bow. ‘This is the soldier who stopped the cataphracts breaking though the front line of the Herculiani. He killed the leader – flicked off his head with a single blow! I saw it myself.’

  ‘What’s your name, soldier?’ the emperor demanded.

  He opened his mouth, but his throat was dry and he could not speak.

  ‘His name’s Knucklehead!’ somebody called out, laughing.

  ‘His name’s Aurelius Castus. Ninth Cohort, century of Priscus.’

  ‘Aurelius Castus,’ the emperor called, almost shouting so all around could hear him. ‘A true warrior of Rome! A true Herculian! Tribune Constantine, present this man with the torque of valour.’

  Cheers from the assembled soldiers. Another officer was stepping forward now, a tall young man with a raw flushed face and a heavy jaw. In his hands was a circlet of twisted gold with a clasp of linked horse-heads. The young soldier stood still, trying not to flinch, as the tribune fastened the torque around his neck.

  Caesar Galerius had already moved away, congratulating other men, awarding further decorations. From the raised mound, surrounded by the spoils of war, he turned to address the assembled troops.

  ‘Persia is yours,’ he cried, in his thin metallic voice. ‘The empire is yours! Joviani, Herculiani, Claudiani, Flaviani, victorious! Unbreakable!’

  He slept for thirty-six hours, and missed the plundering of the Persian camp. But he heard about it later – the Great King’s treasury, his priests and ministers, even the ladies of the royal Zenana were all in Roman hands now. The soldiers were glutted with gold. One man had found a tooled leather pouch full of round grey stones; he threw the stones away and kept the pouch, and became the laughing stock of his cohort. The stones he had discarded were pearls, lost in the dust now, but the soldiers were so rich that nobody cared.

  Narses was beaten, a fugitive in his own domain, but still Galerius led his army onwards, east down the Araxes and then south across the border into Media Atropatene. Everywhere cities opened their gates, chieftains knelt before the conquerors from the west. Through Corduene and Adiabene they marched, down from the tight cold air of the highlands to the summer heat of the Tigris valley. The mighty Persian Empire, Rome’s oldest and most implacable foe, collapsed before them.

  Turning westwards, they forced a crossing of the Tigris above the ruins of Nineveh and marched out onto the plains of Mesopotamia. Then, after breaking the siege of Nisibis, they turned south down the wide flat valley of the Tigris. All the way to Ctesiphon, the young soldier marched with his comrades of II Herculia in the vanguard of the army. When the Persian capital surrendered, he joined them in their parade through the streets, their spears garlanded with laurel.

  For the rest of his life he would have the memory of this victory. He kept that thought in his mind on the long hard march home, back up the Euphrates and across the Syrian plains to Antioch and the distant garrison forts of the Danube frontier. Surely nothing in the remainder of his days would match the glory of that campaign: into old age he would dream of it.

  So he told himself. But he could know nothing of what his future held.

  Part 1

  Seven Years Later

  1

  Eboracum, Northern Britannia, April AD 305

  By the time the walls of the fortress appeared in the distance the mist was thickening into rain. The line of soldiers on the road, thirty-eight men of Legion VI Victrix, increased their pace.

  ‘Close up,’ their centurion called over his shoulder, smacking his palm with the short broad-headed staff that marked his rank. ‘Military step – let’s try and look like soldiers, not a gang of labourers!’

  The men grinned mirthlessly. They could see the scaffolding along the wall near the gate, the figures of other soldiers working to repair the old fortifications. Their new centurion wanted to give a good impression to his colleagues. But they closed up anyway, dropping into the accustomed regular pace, muddied boots crunching on the gravelled road. Centurion Aurelius Castus was a hard bastard, and an ugly slab-faced brute of a Pannonian too, but in the months since he had joined them they had come, grudgingly, to respect him.

  They had been out all day, repairing a flood-damaged cause­way on the Derventio road. All of them were tired and wet, hands blistered and legs aching from digging and shifting rocks and gravel. While the men of other centuries often marched out on work details carrying only their tools, Centurion Castus never allowed his men to leave the fortress without full kit. Each man, besides his mattock or muddied shovel, carried a sword and two light javelins, with a leather-covered shield slung on his back. They wore no armour or helmets – they were thankful for small mercies – but now as they marched they slung the tools and carried their shields
and javelins instead. They were soldiers, they told themselves, not labourers.

  The road ran straight, across a bridge and between the low warehouses towards the high double-arched gate of Eboracum fortress. Marching at the head of his men, Castus caught the smell of woodsmoke from the bath-house inside the walls. As his little half-century approached the scaffolding, some of the men up there called out to them – the usual obscene jokes.

  ‘Castus!’

  He rotated his head on his thick neck. Valens, a fellow centurion of the Third Cohort, stood on the lowest platform of the scaffolding, overseeing his men. ‘Been admiring the British scenery again, have you?’

  ‘No scenery around here,’ Castus replied in a carrying growl. ‘That’s for civilised places. Out here on the edge of the world all you get’s mist and mud.’

  Laughter from the men on the scaffolding. Valens, hang­ing from the wooden beams, called back as Castus passed through the gate. ‘The world has no edges, brother! It’s a sphere, as everyone knows. Or is this information not current in Pannonia?’

  As his men filed into barracks after kit inspection, Castus pulled off his round woollen cap and tipped his head back into the ache of his shoulders. The rain was slackening, but he enjoyed the feel of the cool water on his face and scalp. He looked up into the sky, iron grey, darkening. A deep sigh ran through him. Every evening he felt this way. Every evening the same dull torpor settled over him.

  Twelve years in the army, and I end up rotting in this place…

  Twelve months before, he had still been a soldier of II Herculia. Getting promoted to centurion before the age of thirty was a rare honour, won in the campaign against the Carpi on the great plains north of the Danube. But promotion had meant transfer – not only out of the elite Herculiani, his home since he had joined the legions, but away from the Danubian provinces, where he had been born, and across half the empire to this dull backwater of a frontier.

  Fate had directed it – so he told himself. But that was little consolation. VI Victrix was an old legion, based here at Eboracum for nearly two hundred years. Few of the men in the fortress had ever seen combat, although there were many among them with grey hair. Ever since he was sixteen, when he had run away from home to join the legions, Castus had wanted only to be a soldier in the army of Rome. So he was still, but this life – work details, route marches and paperwork, overseeing building and road-mending, ordering his men to cut wood for the baths or whitewash the charcoal to stop the locals from stealing it – did not seem much like soldiering.

  Back in his own quarters at the end of the barrack block, he threw off his swordbelt and hung it from a hook on the wall. Dragging his mud-stained grey tunic off over his head, he flung it into a basket for the laundry slaves to collect. His left shoulder ached – even seven years after that wound at the battle of Oxsa, damp weather gave him the dulled memory of pain. He wheeled his arm, stretching the muscles until the ache faded. Slinging a rough woollen towel and a clean tunic over his shoulder, he walked out bare-chested in his boots and breeches, into the rain again, heading for the baths.

  Eboracum had been here even before the Sixth Legion had arrived in Britain. Most of the present fortress, like its crumbling walls, had been built by the great Emperor Severus, although there were parts of it that dated back to the distant days of Hadrian. They were just names to Castus, but they had a ring of ancient glory about them. Back in those days, so he liked to believe, the Roman army had still been the force that had conquered the world. Now they did their best to hang on to what they had.

  As he paced down the lane between the barracks and crossed the wide central avenue, Castus saw decaying walls, peeling plaster, buildings that had once housed cohorts now empty and abandoned. The legion had shrunk since the great days of Severus – the fortress had been built for six thousand legionaries and a couple of auxiliary cohorts, but now housed barely two-thirds that number. The century he commanded, still officially eighty men, boasted only sixty-nine at full strength.

  But it was easy to grow despondent, and it was not in Castus’s nature to dwell on things that happened before he had been born. Let other men mumble about the past; he had known the might of a triumphant Roman army in the field, as he knew the great expanses of the empire, having marched back and forth from one border to the other. His experiences set him apart from the other men serving at Eboracum: few of them had even left Britain. They had been born here, sons of old soldiers of the legion, some going back generations. The distant affairs of empire, wars far away in the east or on the Danube, were as insubstantial to them as the mythic tales of Troy.

  At first they had regarded Castus with suspicious awe, know­ing that he had marched with Galerius against the Persians, all the way to Ctesiphon and the ruins of Babylon. The torque he wore around his neck was a rare distinction, proof of his valour. Now they just joked about his background, and he had given up even mentioning the matter if he could avoid it. But he kept the memories to himself, to warm his blood in the cold and empty nights. A distant dream of heat and dust, the serrated shadows of the palm groves, the taste of fresh dates and wine, a girl he had known in Antioch, and another in Edessa… Above it all, the fury of battle and the triumph of victory.

  Turning off the lane, Castus passed through the gate into the forecourt of the baths. Smoke swelled from the furnace room, beaten down by the persistent rain. Inside, the exercise hall was packed with noise, echoing under the high arched ceiling. Naked men ran laps, others squatted in groups playing dice or the twelve-lines game, and three or four leather balls were thudding between the walls. From the changing room Castus moved through the whooping mob in the cold plunge chamber and into the steam of the hot bath. Here and there one of his own men spotted him and touched a knuckle to his forehead in brief salute.

  Stripped naked, he eased himself down into the hot water. The other bathers had moved aside to give him room: his bulk, the scars stippling his flesh, and the gold torque he still wore marked him out even for those who did not know his rank. Lounging in blissful solitude, he considered that he might have preferred the rough company of the common soldiers, but his promotion had also raised him above the pleasures of the crowd. A long soak, he thought, then a sweat, an oil and scrape, and a plunge in the cold bath to freshen up.

  He stretched his heavy arms along the marble rim of the bath and closed his eyes. Steam filled his nostrils. His stomach growled, and he considered getting one of his men to fetch a couple of honey cakes from the stall under the portico outside…

  ‘Centurion Castus? Is Centurion Aurelius Castus here?’

  He opened one eye, staring into the fog. The caller was standing in the arched doorway, fully dressed. A military clerk from legion headquarters.

  Castus lowered himself in the bath until his chin touched the water, willing the man to go away and leave him in peace. But already he could hear the others pointing him out and the scrape and tap of the clerk’s boots on the tiled floor as he approached.

  A voice through the steam. ‘Are you Centurion Castus?’

  Head back on the marble, Castus stared up at the man. Grunted.

  ‘You’re ordered to report to the praetorium,’ the clerk said, with a cold smile.

  Castus stretched his limbs in the water. ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘The order comes from the distinguished Aurelius Arpagius. You’re to come immediately…’

  Sighing heavily, Castus closed his eyes again for a moment. A summons from the governor. Unusual, but he didn’t let his curiosity show. The clerk tapped his foot on the tiles. Then, with a sudden movement, Castus pushed himself up and out of the bath. The water surged up with him, soaking the clerk’s tunic.

  ‘Right then, let’s go. Unless you want to give me time to get dressed first?’

  Back through the early evening gloom, dressed and scrubbing a towel over his damp bristling hair, Castus followed the clerk towards the praetorium, the governor’s residence at the heart of the fortress. Unlike most
other legions in the empire, the Sixth was still commanded by a civilian, the Praeses Governor of Britannia Secunda. Most of the time, though, Aurelius Arpagius concerned himself with administering his province, leaving the running of the legion to his tribunes and senior centurions. Castus had never spoken to the man – hardly even seen him, except at the triennial pay parades. He had no idea what such an exalted figure might want with him now – and in the praetorium itself as well.

  At the corner of the headquarters building, a stooped figure stood in the rain. His damp tunic hung unbelted to his shins, and his hair was slicked flat. He pulled himself upright as Castus approached.

  ‘Centurion!’

  Castus paused, letting the clerk idle ahead of him. ‘How long’s it been now, Modestus?’

  ‘Eight hours, centurion.’ The man’s head bobbed as he spoke, his jaw working.

  ‘Remind me why you’re here?’

  ‘Drunk in barracks, centurion. Won’t happen again.’

  Castus snorted a laugh. Modestus was a repeat offender. But he could not remember how long he’d ordered the man to stand here on punishment.

  ‘Get back to the barracks and dry off.’

  ‘Thank you, centurion…’ Modestus looked like he was about to say more, and Castus dismissed him with a slap on the shoulder. From the lane beside the headquarters, the clerk was clearing his throat noisily.

  Around the corner, they reached the shelter of the praetorium portico. The clerk left him there, and Castus marched through the high, pillared doorway into the entrance hall. His boots clattered on the marble floor, and sentries to either side straight­ened to attention. At the far end of the hall, arched doors opened to a pillared garden at the heart of the building, lost in evening murk and rain. Between the doorways, lit by a flaming brazier, four statues stood in a raised niche.

  Castus approached, bowing his head. The statues were near life size: four men in the gilded cuirasses and short capes of Roman military officers. Their painted faces were stern and blunt, with the heavy features of Pannonian peasant soldiers, just like those of Castus himself. The emperors, the four rulers of the Roman world: the Augusti Diocletian and Maximian, and the Caesars Galerius and Constantius. All of them looked alike, but each Augustus clasped his Caesar in a paternal embrace.